Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can eat the larvae in them.”

— Steven Erikson

352. “The air swirled into darkness around Paran. He blinked, saw the trees of the estate garden rising before him.”

— Steven Erikson

353. “Heed the lesson there, son.” “What lesson?” “Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don’t notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.” “I want to be a soldier. A hero.” “You’ll grow out of it.”

— Steven Erikson

354. “Soldiers have no imagination, meaning they’re capable of vast surprises.”

— Steven Erikson

355. “To know and to understand that we must all die, Trull Sengar, is not to worship death. To know and to understand is itself magic, for it made us stand tall.”

— Steven Erikson

356. “Not that freedom ensured happiness. Indeed, to be free was to live in absence. Of responsibilities, of loyalties, of the pressures that expectation imposed.”

— Steven Erikson

357. “It is the legacy of most intelligent beings to revel in slaughter for a time,’ Haut replied. ‘In this we play at being gods. In this, we lie to ourselves with delusions of omnipotence. There is but one measure to the wisdom of a people, and that is the staying hand. Fail in restraint and murder thrives in your eyes, and all your claims to civilization ring hollow.”

— Steven Erikson

358. “Why not worship money? At least its rewards are obvious and immediate. But no, that was simplistic. Letherii worship was more subtle, its ethics bound to those traits and habits that well served the acquisition of wealth. Diligence, discipline, hard work, optimism, the personalization of glory. And the corresponding evils: sloth, despair and the anonymity of failure. The world was brutal enough to winnow one from the other and leave no room for doubt or mealy equivocation.”

— Steven Erikson

359. “The laws are not what they seem. Order is an illusion. It hides its lies in your very eyes, deceiving all they see. Because to see is to change that which is seen. No, none of us will ever see true. We cannot. It is impossible. I give you a life without answers, my children.”

— Steven Erikson

360. “Then we’re dead all that much sooner. So it goes.”

— Steven Erikson

361. “Oh, what a miserable man you are! If you’re wrong and he tries to bite me, I will be very upset with you, Mok. I will lay waste to your loins. I will make your eyes crossed so that everyone who looks at you and your silly mask will not be able to help but laugh. And I will think of other things, too, I assure you.”

— Steven Erikson

362. “We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As for past acts of depravity, we prefer to ignore those. Progress, after all, means to look ever forward, and whatever we have trampled in our wake is best forgotten.”

— Steven Erikson

363. “To love in absence is to float on ever still waters. No sudden currents, no treacherous tides, no possibility of drowning.”

— Steven Erikson

364. “How many of us bow before a god in the desperate hope that we can somehow shape our fate? Praying to that familiar face pushes away our terror of the unknown – the unknown being the future. Who knows, maybe these Tiste Andii are the only ones among us all who see the truth, the truth being oblivion.”

— Steven Erikson

365. “Bloodflies rode her drawn gasps into her mouth, biting as she gagged and spat.”

— Steven Erikson

366. “When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.”

— Steven Erikson

367. “To draw a weapon is to announce an end to uncertainty.”

— Steven Erikson

368. “Do you truly believe suicide belongs solely to the one taking his or her own life? All that rot about selfishness and self-hatred? The lies we tell ourselves to absolve us of all blame, of all the roles that we played in that wretched death?”

— Steven Erikson

369. “You’ll not have me, Lord, because you can’t.”

— Steven Erikson

370. “People who make up their minds about something never listen to advice – especially when it’s to the contrary.”

— Steven Erikson

371. “And somehow they would be less than human then. The game the mind must play to unleash destruction.”

— Steven Erikson

372. “Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.”

— Steven Erikson

373. “They didn’t shelter their own, didn’t feed their own, didn’t heal their own, and yet, in the midst of all this inhumanity, they held themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization.”

— Steven Erikson

374. “And in the city on all sides, the howling of the Hounds rose in an ear-shattering, soul-flailing crescendo. The Lord of Death had arrived, to walk the streets in the City of Blue Fire.”

— Steven Erikson

375. “This, then, is friendship. A family you choose. What you give to it, you give freely. What you withhold from it, measures its depth.”

— Steven Erikson

376. “A savage awareness seemed to ride the spinning sand, reaching relentlessly past the folds of their telaban, a thousand abrasive fingers clawing paths across their skin. Loose cloth and rope ends spiked upward, whipping with urgent rhythm. The roar filled the air, filled their skulls.”

— Steven Erikson

377. “Love could be such a squalid emotion: burning bright in the midst of pathos, the subject of pity and contempt, it blazed with brilliant stupidity all the same.”

— Steven Erikson

378. “They are a generation that has tasted blood, and where horror fades, nostalgia seeps in. In war all is simple, and there is appeal in this. Who among us is comforted by confusion, uncertainty?”

— Steven Erikson

379. “Reconciliation does not demand that one side surrender to the other. The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide.”

— Steven Erikson

380. “War needs no gods, only mortal contestants, two enemies and whatever reasons they invent in order to justify killing each other.”

— Steven Erikson

381. “Kneels? Falters? Look to the night sky, foolish man, and gauge the victor in the contest between Dark and Light.”

— Steven Erikson

382. “The failing was that it was so easily won, and therefore became a thing of little worth for the recipient. Could no one see the hurt she felt, each and every time she was cast aside, sorely used, battered by rejection? Did they think she welcomed such feelings, the crushing despond of seeing the paucity of her worth?”

— Steven Erikson

383. “When those dreams in that unreachable future suddenly rise up around you, how can you not be blinded to their truths? All at once, it is here. All at once, you are living in its very midst. Why then must you seek to pull away? He.”

— Steven Erikson

384. “Is possession a virtue? Is a lifetime of working for some rich toad a virtue? Is loyal employment in some merchant house a virtue? Loyal to what? To whom? Oh, have they paid for that loyalty with a hundred docks a week? Like any other commodity? But then, which version is truer – the virtue of self-serving acquisitiveness or the virtue of loyalty to one’s employer? Are.”

— Steven Erikson

385. “Secrets have power so long as they remain secrets.”

— Steven Erikson

386. “Belief creates, Arathan. So you have been taught. The god cannot exist until it is worshipped, until it is given shape, personality. It is made in the crucible of faith.”

— Steven Erikson

387. “We are nothing but our own needs. She but showed each of us the face we hide from ourselves and everyone else. She shamed us by exposing our truths.”

— Steven Erikson

388. “Just so. And wonder, my friend, is the intellect’s most feared foe. Its path is love, and love is the language of humility. The rational mind would stand over it with a bloodstained sword, and in the empty bleakness of its eyes you will see its triumph.”

— Steven Erikson

389. “The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.”

— Steven Erikson

390. “Age was a demon, a haunting that slipped into the bones whispering weakness and frailty. It stole his muscles, his agility, and the quickness of his wit. It seemed a miserable reward for surviving, all things told, which was proof enough that life was a fool’s bargain.”

— Steven Erikson

391. “They take us at this moment, these unwavering men and women who presume to rule over us, and but point us in the direction of a weaker victim. This is their game, knowing or not, and as ever the assumption is that we’ll never turn on our masters – so long as an enemy remains within reach of our blunted, frustrated fury. And.”

— Steven Erikson

392. “I would hold, my friend, that what you describe is but one side of the matter, and indeed one that looks only inward, as if the borders of your life enclose everything to be valued, while what lies beyond is of no worth whatsoever.”

— Steven Erikson

393. “The bully’s greatest terror,′ Bugg said, ‘comes when he meets someone bigger and meaner –.”

— Steven Erikson

394. “I, Borduke of the 6th squad in the 9th Company of the 8th Legion, swear on the downy belly of the Queen of Dreams that the creature before me is a natural, unaltered Birdshit scorpion, and may my father’s ghost remain in its tomb, since the inheritance was mine to lose anyway, right? Dead means you don’t care any more, right? It had better, because if it doesn’t, then I’m doomed to paternal haunting for the rest of my days.”

— Steven Erikson

395. “Proof that the freedoms once accorded non-Letherii peoples were born of both paternalism and a self-serving posturing as a benign overseer. What is given is taken away, just like that.”

— Steven Erikson

396. “Sympathy was like water in the desert. Hoarded, reluctantly meted out in the barest of sips. And he, Taralack Veed, could walk a thousand deserts on a single drop.”

— Steven Erikson

397. “A wayward wind drew a wintry breath across the scene with a sound like a gasp, shivering the grasses.”

— Steven Erikson

398. “I will answer in kind. No act is final. Another inevitably awaits.”

— Steven Erikson

399. “The three other rickety chairs had been pulled up around the lone table in the room’s centre. Above the table hung an oil lantern, which shone down on Fiddler, Hedge and Mallet as they sat playing cards.”

— Steven Erikson

400. “There would always be, he now understood, those for whom violence was righteous. Sudden.”

— Steven Erikson